It takes a smart actress to play a dumb blond

Never Done: I met (and worked with) Nancy Anderson

I was having a hard time finding a blond actress for the video I am producing, and that seemed ridiculous to me. So instead of just repeating the casting notice I had posted several places, I wrote a Facebook status update that merely said, "How hard can it be to find a blond actress in NYC?" And bingo. The referrals started pouring in. (Thank you, RIPFest, Michelle, John, and Jill!)

I ended up casting Nancy Anderson, a wonderful actress with Broadway (and lots of other) cred to play a 5-second role. But that's 5 seconds out of a 40-second video, so that's 12.5% of golden screen time. Nancy went to college with Jill, who I know because she and my mom were really close friends (Jill is younger than I am, and my mom was great at inter-generational friendships) and also because I like reading her parenting blog, Langer Loksh (long noodle, in Yiddish, which was her dad's nickname for her.) At the top of her blog, it says, "Come for the birth defects. Stay for the Disney Princesses." This is what it, and she, is about, in Jill's own words:

I started this blog to keep friends and family informed about my son Charlie, who was born with something called hemifacial microsomia. The right side of his face is sort of squished and his right ear looks like a shiitake mushroom. He has moderate to severe hearing loss in that ear. People were worried about him. He's OK.

Along the way I discovered that in some ways, my mini-me daughter, now a first grader, actually poses the bigger parenting challenge. (Drama!)

Now we have switched from man-to-man to zone defense with the arrival of new baby Oscar.

My husband Jeff has 18 first cousins. My Grandma Sophie lived to be almost 104. I won $64,000 on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

So that's Jill who introduced me to her college friend Nancy. When a stunning and talented actress walks into the studio, ready to put on a bikini and white mink ear muffs, you don't usually think "geologist" right off the bat, but Jill and Nancy did, in fact, study geology together at Tufts. It's a weird thing to be a feminist and to write a role that intentionally minimizes and stereotypes women. And then to ask someone you've never met to play the part while a man gets to wear a button-up shirt and deliver all the speaking lines. It might be a weird thing to be a feminist and be asked to do the role, but here's the thing. I have found that the more confident and skilled someone is, the more relaxed (s)he is about doing stuff that could be perceived as reductive. And Nancy walked into the room with grace, confidence, professionalism, and collegial generosity and then she nailed the role. She gave us 10 different takes on her one non-speaking sequence. She cracked us up each time. She proved no exception to the rule that it takes a smart actress to play a dumb blond.

Now if this weren't a blog about things I'd never done, I would also glow on and on about working with Bill Franke, who got to wear a button-up shirt and deliver all the speaking lines. But I've worked with Bill before, which is why I wanted to work with him again, so as deserving as he is of all my praise, he will have to wait for it til we release the video on April 1. (Alright, not really. He was perfect. And you should go see him in The Soldier Dreams at Theatre East.)